Today I finished my quilted tote bag, which I think all or almost all Crackpots saw during All Together Week. I had lots of the flowered fabric, which I love, left over from making the applique table runner, so I decided to use it to make this bag. It’s from the book Sew and Go Totes by Kristine Poor. The author is an engineer, so the instructions are very clear. This is the most complicated bag I’ve attempted (though it’s still pretty simple) to date, and it turned out great! And I only had to buy some solid black fabric for the lining and a little stiff Pellon craft interfacing that goes in the handles. The stars form 3 separate pockets on the front and 3 on the back. Now I only have a small amount of the flowered fabric left, so I’ll have to get very creative with how I use that…

Here is my applique table runner that I’ve been working on for a while. I hand quilted around the applique and machine quilted the borders in the ditch. All I have left to do is to blind stitch the binding to the back. I love the fabric and colors, and it looks great in our green dining room!

Here’s some of the crochet food I’ve made lately for a friend of my mom’s, who has requested 5 sets of various crochet foods for baby gifts, as well as a cheeseburger for herself!

Well, I’m very relieved to hear that I was not responsible for nearly crashing the blog! While I’m waiting to hear if anyone else wants to weigh in on the options for Crackpot Quilting Day, I thought I’d post a picture of the placemats I’ve been making. I got the focus fabric at Fields a while ago. The pattern is free from the JoAnn’s website. Unlike other placemats I’ve made, this one doesn’t have binding around the edge. Instead, you layer the top, batting, and a piece of muslin and quilt that. Then, you place the quilted top and real backing right sides together and sew around them except for a hole for turning it right side out. The result is slightly thicker than other placemats I’ve made. It may have been slightly faster because I didn’t have to do binding. Overall, I’m pleased, though I think my general preference is for a standard binding for placemats.

Only a week and a half until All Together Week – yay! It seems that quite a few Crackpots are involved with painting projects (!), so I’ve taken it upon myself to sort through the comments and try to come up with a good project for the Crackpot Quilting Day. First of all, it seems that Crackpots are flexible – no one insisted on one thing or another – everyone just wanted to get together and sew. There was a preference for a collaborative quilt top rather than individual projects and a preference for standard piecing rather than paper piecing. So, here are a few possibilities I’ve come up with so far:

Friendship Star Block
It’s nice and easy – just squares and half square triangles, so I think we could make quite a few. I think it would look good with bright, small-scale prints for the stars and a light background fabric. I probably have enough of a background fabric so that we could use the same one throughout.

Snowball Nine Patch
I found this one while browsing around and thought it looked cool. Still pretty easy, though it might require a bit more planning if we want the square from the 9 patch to match the snowball that is touching it.

Spinner
This block is from Bonnie Hunter’s Addicted to Scraps column in the March/April ‘10 issue of Quiltmaker. They have a picture of how it would look together with other blocks if you vary the color of the central star but keep the whites and reds.

Batik Scramble
Ok, this one is a little hard to explain, and unfortunately I don’t have a visual aid for it. (Have I mentioned how much I dislike the new Quiltmaker website? It’s impossible to find any useful information. Aargh! But I digress…) The pattern is Batik Scramble from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ‘09. But I would change it to make it Scrappy Rainbows Scramble. If you have a picture of the quilt, what you would do is turn the even numbered rows over so that they go the same way as the odd numbered rows and look like rainbows. Then you’d do one row of red, then orange, yellow, etc. If you don’t have a magazine to look at, suffice to say it would involve 5″ squares of scraps in ROYGBIV colors and 2.5″ squares of background fabric and a flip and stitch technique.

Double 4 Patch on Point
Imagine the block on the left on point, with a variety of colors for the small squares. There’s a quilt pattern called Wonder Baby from Sweet and Simple Baby Quilts by Mary Hickey, which some people may have noticed at Fields. It’s the quilt on the cover of the book, so you can get a glimpse of it here.
I have checked the book out from the library and have the complete pattern. I think it looks cute and fun.

Little Sister
This is from Quiltmaker Sept/Oct ‘01 for those who go that far back.
It’s 9 patch blocks
on point, and the effect is similar to Wonder Baby.

Ok, Crackpots, that’s all I have time for. What looks good?

P.S. To the Creator of the Blog – I hope you are impressed by my Posting of Pictures from Other Sites and Linking skills. I’m mightily impressed with myself.

Here’s the result:

Some thoughts on painting…

1. People who say painting is cheap must already own their painting supplies. And buy cheap paint. I didn’t have any paint supplies, and a trip to the local home store with a long list of everything but the paint set me back about $200. Add in high-quality paint, and the price keeps going up.
2. Painting the ceiling is no fun at all. When using white paint on white primer, it’s really hard to figure out which areas have been painted and which haven’t.
3. When the guy at the paint store recommends a product, believe him. The edger is great.
4. No-VOC paint is great for people (like me!) sensitive to paint fumes. I used Benjamin Moore Natura and I didn’t notice any aroma until I was nearly done with the room – and even then, it was vastly less smelly than normal paint. I ended up having to do two coats on the walls, but according to the woman I talked to at the paint store when I picked up the second gallon, that’s fairly common for this paint. I’d much rather do two non-smelly coats than one smelly coat.
5. Taking a ceiling fan/light down requires two people, but it is possible for one person to put it back up.
6. When the fan manual doesn’t know what color the wires coming out of the ceiling are, consult the internet – there is a standard configuration.
7. I hadn’t expected painting to be quite so much work, or give me as much of a sense of accomplishment. I had some help for moving things out of the room, but did all the prep and painting and moving things back into the room all by myself.

I still need to do some touch-up work (blue spots on the ceiling – whoops!). But that can wait.

Here is the cover in use:

And here it is without the tissues. Just a simple rectangle. Well, OK, it is embellished with those cool Asian knots, but those are not essential.

It’s about a month until All Together Week – yay! What would crackpots like to do this year? The traditional making of blocks for a charity or Project Linus quilt or top? What pattern? I like the past year’s Project Linus kites, but I’m open to anything. Or do we want to do something different? Everyone get together and sew on our current projects? A workshop by Marty on making little zippered bags? A workshop by me on making a reusable shopping tote?

What do all of you think?

And here it is, my second green shopping bag! I’m very proud of it. I made this from a pattern in the Jan/Feb 2010 issue of Quiltmaker. I used squares of the vegetables fabrics Helene gave me for Christmas as the focus prints. The directions have you use duck cloth as a foundation, which gives it stability. It also has a cotton fabric lining, although I don’t think you’d have to make one. The duck cloth works well enough, but having a separate lining gives it a slightly more finished look.

This is a reusable shopping bag I made recently from a Debbie Mumm panel I got at Jo-Ann’s. It was easy to do, and I’m quite happy with how it turned out. I added a lining to give the inside a slightly more “finished” look.

Coming next: a picture of my other, more impressive, reusable shopping bag…